for the lady. This low price might lead us to
imagine that the Moorish taste in beauty differed from that of Regnard;
but the Algerine market may have been overstocked with women on the day
of sale. Achmet took his new chattels to Constantinople. Perceiving
Regnard's talent for _ragouts_ and sauces, he made a cook of him. What
became of Elvire history has omitted, perhaps discreetly, to relate.
After two years of toil and ill-treatment, Regnard received money from
home to buy his freedom. He paid twelve thousand livres for himself and
the fair Provencale. Achmet more than quadrupled his investment, and no
doubt thought slavery a divine institution.

In Paris once more, Regnard hung his chains in his library and was
preparing to lead a comfortable life with Elvire, when the superfluous
husband, whose death had been reported, most unseasonably reappeared. He
had been ransomed by the Mathurins, a religious order, who believed it
to be the duty of Christians to deliver their fellow-men from
bondage,--Abolitionists of the seventeenth century, who, strange as some
of us may think it, were honored by their countrymen and the Christian
world. Regnard yielded gracefully the right he had acquired by purchase
to the prior claim of the husband, and made preparations for another
journey. With two compatriots, De Fercourt and De Corberon, he traversed
the Low Countries and Denmark and crossed over to Stockholm. The King of
Sweden received the travellers graciously and proposed a visit to
Lapland. Furnished with the royal letters of recommendation, they sailed
up the Gulf of Bothnia to Torneo, and thence pushed north by land until
they came to Lake Tornoetrask. Eighteen miles from the lower end of
the lake they ascended a high mountain which they named Metavara, "from
the Latin word _meta_ and the Finlandic word _vara_, which means rock:
that is to say, the rock of limits." "We were four hours in climbing to
the top by paths which no mortal had as yet known. When we reached it,
we perceived the whole extent of Lapland, and the Icy Ocean as far as
the North Cape, on the side it turns to the west. This may, indeed, be
called arriving at the end of the world and jostling the axle of the
pole (_se frotter a l'essieu du pole_)." Here they set up a tablet of
stone they had brought with their luggage,--_monument eternel_, Regnard
says. "It shall make known to posterity that three Frenchmen did not
cease to travel northward until the earth fa